Long-Term Development of Urban Agriculture: Resilience and Sustainability of Farmers Facing the Covid-19 Pandemic in Japan

Shingo Yoshida,Hironori Yagi

doi:10.3390/su13084316

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has forced global food systems to face unprecedented uncertain shocks even in terms of human health. Urban agriculture is expected to be more resilient because of its short supply chain for urban people and diversified farming activities. However, the short-and long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban farms remain unclear. This study aims to reveal the conditions for farm resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the relationship between short-term farm resilience and long-term farm development using data from a survey of 74 farms located in Tokyo. The results are as follows. First, more than half of the sample farms increased their farm sales during this period. This resilience can be called the “persistence” approach. Second, short-term farm resilience and other sustainable farm activities contributed to improving farmers’ intentions for long-term farm development and farmland preservation. Third, the most important resilience attributes were the direct marketing, entrepreneurship, and social networks of farmers. We discussed the necessity of building farmers’ transformative capabilities for a more resilient urban farming system. These results imply that support to enhance the short-term resilience of urban farms is worth more than the short-term profit of the farms.

Highlights

This paper considers the Covid-19 pandemic as a kind of social and economic shock, and it assesses the resilience of UPA
Description of Sample Farms we summarize the characteristics of the sample farms
Fisher’s exact test demonstrated statistically significant differences among resilient types (p value = 0.03 < 0.05), and pairwise comparisons of the Wilcoxon rank sum test revealed that at least the highly resilient farmers tended to develop their farms more than the middleresilient ones. These results suggest that farmers who demonstrated their bounce-forward resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic are more proactive in developing their farms in the long run

Summary

Introduction

According to Savary et al [1], the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on six components of food security, such as primary production of food, stability of production, food reserves and stockpiles, physical access to food, economic access to food, and diets, can be classified into three types: short-term (0–3 months), medium-term (3–12 months), and long-term (1 year or more). In the context of these circumstances, Savary et al added “human health” as a food security driver It is necessary for researchers and policymakers to consider the Covid-19 pandemic not as a one-shot global challenge but as a possible risk to human health in the future and investigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on global and local food systems

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Conclusion